Let's Talk: Would You Bread Your Cat?

The first known "bread cat" photo was posted August 2, 2011, on Reddit and Tumblr.

Breading cats: it's the hottest new Internet meme, according to Gawker. But a quick check of the Cheezburger Network's Know Your Meme website reveals that the phenomenon originated last August. Seven months is eons in web time, so you'd think the craze would have died out by now. But no: People are still turning their cats into sandwiches and taking pictures of them.

A Facebook page dedicated to the cat sandwich craze had more than 10,000 likes by January of 2012, and the photos just keep coming in.

Web memes have a pretty short half-life, which tells me that the breaded cats phenom will soon jump the shark, if it hasn't already.

The punsters got hold of the breaded cats meme and took it in a whole new direction.

Thousands of hours of marketing research still haven't uncovered a reason certain Internet phenomena explode into such popularity that even print media outlets cover it, while others fade into oblivion without so much as a whimper. But there's one thing I do know after all these years of geeking out on the web: If it involves pictures of cats doing silly things, the odds are good that it'll go viral.

I don't know about you, but I have plenty of photos of my cats doing ridiculous — and ridiculously cute — things, and I don't need to waste perfectly good bread to hop on this bandwagon.

That doesn't mean I'm sitting here sucking on sour grapes and ranting about the rampant exploitation of cats for the sake of a laugh, though. When you see the expressions on some of these feline faces, you can't help but get a chuckle out of them.

Kitty says, "Why U do dis to me?"

My cats would flay me if I tried to put clothes on them, so I know they definitely would not be down with bread-hat style. If they didn't make mincemeat out of my hands, they'd just eat the prop before I could get my camera ready anyhow.